Big Fish - Shark

Eating the Big Fish

Often, in our work with organizational leaders, executives will reference seminal works by prominent business authors. Some titles seem to pop up routinely, others less so. One title we hear surprisingly seldom is Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders (Adam Morgan, 1999). Yet, to us, the concepts Morgan develops in Eating the Big Fish are every bit as critical to success as those of Trout and Reis, or Rosser Reeves, or Kim and Mauborgne, or Malcolm Gladwell, or Jim Collins, or Seth Godin. And so, we’ve decided to offer a brief overview, here… Read more

Bite Apple

One Last Bite at the Apple

In 1999, Adam Morgan published Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, a manifesto on winning in the face of superior competition. Big Fish was about taking on the market leader despite limited resources; it was about making your own rules; it was about redefining the terms by which a product category should be judged.

Big Fish offered an alternative path to the top. In every market, Morgan argued, the leader was already entrenched, his inertia impossible to overcome by brute force, and his war chest overflowing with resources. The only path to market share, Morgan warned, was to win the battle for mindshare, and the context of that conflict would be defined in terms of thought leadership – with ideas that truly added value.

Morgan outlined eight “credos” of Challenger Brands. And though he illustrated his work with examples of many companies in many markets, the book was, more than any other, the story of one man – Steve Jobs. Read more

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Five Tips for Creating Meaningful Infographics – Confessions of an Addict

If you’re reading this article on SocialMediaToday, you probably know far more about the mechanics of creating infographics than I. If you’re reading it on my blog, maybe not. Either way, these tips from an infographics addict could go some distance toward improving the social media landscape. So, without further ado, here are five, by-no-means-exhaustive tips…
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